“... full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In fact, there is more good sense in Bate’s short introduction to the 1987 Oxford edition of the Essays of Elia than in Wilson’s 521 pages. I thought it was impossible to add ...”

“... Setting the World on Fire is in two minds. It embodies the minds in two brothers, Piers Mosson and Tom Mosson: the one with his head in the clouds, fated to become a red-carpet knight of the theatre, sure of his direction and of his directing; the other, with his feet on the ground, ready, steady, and going to be a lawyer. Each has sense and sensibility but in ...”

“... to argue that Newman and Woodward were ‘the last movie stars’ at a moment when the 60-year-old Tom Cruise has just had the first $100 million opening of his career, for Top Gun: Maverick, in which he not only acted but performed many of the most dangerous stunts. How would you describe Tom Cruise (or Will Smith or Johnny ...”

“... With Wise Virgin, A.N. Wilson continues his bleak investigation of trauma. The Healing Art (his most acclaimed novel so far) scrutinised human sensibility under the sentence of terminal cancer. Wise Virgin takes the life term and solitary confinement of bereaved blindness. It’s played out with Wilson’s customary geometric neatness of design ...”

“... of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it. When the Tories are in office, all those bankers and businessmen and judges are their friends. There’s no need or inclination to blow them off course. Then suddenly comes Norman Lamont’s shock claim, greeted by prolonged and fervent ...”

“... a far more powerful actor than Kidman, whose most visible achievement to date had been marrying Tom Cruise and starring alongside him in two turkeys, Days of Thunder (1990), a shallow stock car racing drama, and Far and Away (1992), a risible Oirish romance, on which Thomson is too kind to pass judgment, except to say that ‘there are films made for no ...”

“... At the time I believed I had been inspired by such postwar pioneers as Maxwell Jones and Tom Main, who had made asylums more egalitarian and democratic. Now I wonder if I just wanted to work in a Victorian asylum before they were all closed down. The Towers was a red-brick, three-storey structure built around a number of gloomy courtyards, its ...”

“... of Salem, keen to add her faith to the long list of politically correct minority causes. Leslie Wilson’s second novel, Malefice, uses historical imagination in plenty and keeps a skilful balance between propaganda and reality. The word ‘witch’ quivers throughout with its instabilities: a spit or an admiring sigh, a fatal taunt or a proud declaration ...”

“... isn’t a sob story. I liked Cambridge, and then I moved to London and I like it here too. Edmund Wilson described Washington DC as ‘a hollow shell’ – ‘no trouble to clean it out every night and put something else in [its] place’ – and that’s the way I think of London: a hollow shell in which each person makes their own city, over and ...”

“... on our contempt for Jim Callaghan.’ There is Roy Hattersley, ‘a Jenkins man’, whom Harold Wilson would not appoint as a Minister of State in 1969 ‘because he is said to have made three “disloyal” remarks recently. Dick [Crossman] and I agree this is absurd because, although we don’t think Hattersley is a particularly nice man, we know he will ...”

“... of minority government at Westminster is John Major’s in 1996-97; before that there was the Wilson-Callaghan Labour administration of 1974-79 and Ramsay MacDonald’s of 1929-31. In each case, the government reeled from crisis to crisis, eventually limping into a terrible election defeat that relegated their party from power for more than a decade. But ...”

“... it represented were not the only enemies of the elected government. Like Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s adviser in the first part of the 1974-1979 Labour Government, Bernard Donoughue finds plenty of important people lurking in the background to defend the existing order from any levelling which the Labour Government might threaten. He reveals that in ...”

“... his gentle Yorkshire lilt fascinated her almost as much as his millions. She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty hours a day until he achieved fame and fortune. Like Wilson, Hanson came ...”

“... and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has ...”

“... held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her work, however, are often vapid. Can one really take seriously remarks such ...”